From Mac Portable to MacBook Pro: 20 years of Apple laptops

20 years ago, Apple introduced its first portable Mac—we hesitate to say …

Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the first portable Macintosh computer, the aptly-named Macintosh Portable. While it was indeed portable, it was anything but svelte. Apple's first non-desktop Mac weighed in at nearly 16lb and was a beast at 4" thick, 15.25" wide and 14.8" deep. While the 9.8" 1-bit, 640x400 display is quaint by today's standards, it was active-matrix, an expensive rarity in the days of passive matrix portable computers. Unfortunately, it wasn't backlit.

The Portable sold for a whopping $6,500 when it was launched in September 1989, and it's hardly surprising that it was never a top-seller. The hardware was modest, even by contemporary standards. It rocked a 16MHz 68000 CPU and shipped with 1MB of RAM, as well as a 40MB hard drive. It was updated in February 1991 with a backlit display, but Apple snuffed out the Portable line in October of that year when it launched its first PowerBook, the PowerBook 100.

In recognition of the 20-year anniversary of the Macintosh Portable, let's look back at some of the superstars of Apple's laptop lineup—as well as a couple of duds that should never have made it out of Cupertino.

The pre-Power PC era

PowerBook 170

When introduced in October 1991, the PowerBook 100 series had a handful of innovations that are now commonplace in laptops of all shapes and sizes. It moved the keyboard back from the front of the case and had a central control for the pointer in the form of the trackball in front of it. There was also the full complement of desktop Mac ports, including ADB, serial, and SCSI.

The PowerBook 170 was one of the first three PowerBook models released, arriving on the scene along with the PowerBook 100 and 140 in October 1991. It stood out from the other two by virtue of its active-matrix black-and-white display and 25MHz 68030 CPU. All of that computing power came at a price. The 170 shipped for $4,600, $2,100 more than the 16MHz 68000-powered PowerBook 100.

The 170 weighed in at 6.8lbs—a full 9lb lighter than the Mac Portable it replaced—and was far smaller at 2.25"x11.25"x9.3". The 170 was on the market for only a year, replaced by the PowerBook 180 12 months after its introduction, but it truly revolutionized laptop design.

PowerBook Duo 250

Over the last 20 years, Apple has repeatedly tried its hand at a crafting the ultimate sub-notebook. The first attempt was the PowerBook Duo—a slimmer, lighter laptop with little in the way of expandability and no removable storage media. (Sound familiar?) The first in the lineup was the PowerBook Duo 210, which was released in October 1992. It was another year before the Duo 250 shipped, offering an active-matrix grayscale display and a decent amount of computing power in a small package.

The Duo had a 33MHz 68030 CPU, 4MB of RAM, and a 200MB hard drive. Its only connection to the outside world was a single serial port capable of supporting a modem or printer. If you needed to hook it up to a monitor, external SCSI disk drive, or floppy drive, Apple sold the Duo Dock, which offered the full complement of desktop ports as well as NuBus slots. The Dock was an additional $500 above and beyond the $2,600 price of the Duo 250, but turned the sub-notebook into a desktop Mac solution.

The most amazing thing about the Duo was its size and weight. It was only 1.4" thick (compared to the 2.25" of contemporary PowerBooks) and it weighed a scant 4.2lb when the rest of Apple's portable lineup was in the 7lb range. The form factor was a popular one, living on into the PowerPC era in the form of the PowerBook Duo 2300 and then the PowerBook 2400c, which was shipped through the end of 1998.

PowerBook 540c

The years immediately following the death of the Macintosh Portable saw a steady stream of 100-series PowerBooks. All of them were heavy, gray slabs with trackballs and and 68030 processors. Then in May 1994, Apple introduced the "Blackbird," the 500-series PowerBooks. Of the four 500-series PowerBooks, the star of the show was unquestionably the PowerBook 540c.

The PowerBook 540c sported a 33MHz 68LC040 CPU (the first Apple laptop to use that particular CPU), 4MB of RAM (expandable to 12MB), and a 320MB hard drive. The display was a 16-bit active-matrix 9.5" color display that really popped. The 540c (and its siblings the 520, 520c, and 540) was the first to include a trackpad and built-in Ethernet. It could even be upgraded to a PowerPC CPU via a daughtercard. Other highlights included the ability to handle two NiMH batteries for five hours of battery life, an internal modem, and support for early PC Cards via an expansion bay cage.

Perhaps the best thing about the 540c is that it felt fast. Unlike other PowerBooks of the early 1990s, one didn't feel hobbled by the hardware. The 540c arrived at the dawn of the Power Macintosh era, but its contemporary the Power Mac 6100/60 hardly felt like a speed demon with its 60MHz PPC 601 CPU. The 540c was Apple's last top-of-the line 680x0 laptop as the company would migrate the PowerBook lineup to the PowerPC architecture within a couple of years.

The PowerBook era

PowerBook G3 250MHz (Wallstreet)

Although Apple introduced its first PowerPC portable in 1995 (more on the PowerBook 5300 later), it wasn't until the introduction of the Wallstreet PowerBook G3 in May 1998 that Apple produced a truly distinctive PowerBook. Wallstreet wasn't the first laptop to use the G3 (PowerPC 750) processor—that honor went to the "Kanga" that debuted the previous November—but it was the first to be designed from the ground up for the G3.

Wallstreet introduced the build-to-order model for Apple laptops, having a multitude of different configuration options to fit the budget. The 233MHz model included 32MB of RAM and a 12.1" 800x600 color display for $2,299 (sans floppy, modem, and L2 cache); the 292MHz model offered 64MB of RAM and a 14.1" display for a cool $5,599. The price-to-performance sweet spot was the 250MHz model with a 1024x768 13.3" display for $3,899.

Wallstreet offered all sorts of expandability via expansion bays, two Card Bus-compatible PC card slots, and even S-video out on the 13.3" and 14.1" models. The 233MHz machine was a bit of a stinker with its lack of L2 cache, but the 250MHz and 292MHz models were solid performers. The Wallstreet also has the distinction of being the oldest Apple laptop capable of booting into Mac OS X.